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first efforts were tentative, and, indeed, his earliest drawing, a sketch of Soho aliens called "Foreign Affairs," arrived so late that it delayed the number and led to financial loss; but by 1844, when Thackeray was also a power on the staff, he had become the paper's strong man, and its strong man he remained until his death twenty years after. Punch had a great personnel, courage, and sound ideas, but without Leech's sunny humanity week after week it is unlikely to have won its way to such complete popularity and trust. It was he, more than any other contributor, who led it to the heart of the nation.

Leech's cartoons were for the most part suggested to him, the outcome of discussion at the round table, (which is not round); but to a very large extent a larger extent probably than with any of his colleagues or successors: Keene, Du Maurier, or Phil May the social drawings, by which he is now best known and by which he will live, were the fruits of his own observation, visual and aural. That is to say, he provided words as well as drawings. He also followed the line of least resistance. It was enough for him to think an incident funny, to set it down, and by the time it had passed through that filter-a blend of humane understanding and humane fun-which he kept in his brain it was assured of a welcome by Punch's readers too. Today the paper is a little more exacting, a little more complex: a consequence possibly, in some measure, of the fertility and universality of its earlier giant, who anticipated so many later jokes. Today, as it happens, there is more of the Leech spirit in the American Life, where absurdity for its own sake is to a greater extent cultivated. But for twenty years that spirit permeated and dominated Punch. Leech had a great chance and he rose to it. Never

LIVING AGE, VOL. VIII, No. 376.

before had things been made so easy for a satirical artist with alert eyes. Hogarth had had to plan and struggle to get his engravings before the public; Gillray and Rowlandson had only the print-sellers as a medium; but Leech had an editor who appreciated him and gave him his head, and employers who paid handsomely, while his work appeared in a paper which increased its circulation with every number. That is to say, he knew that he had an audience: no small incentive. Opportunity without the man is nothing; but here were both. Leech took it; and the result is the completest survey of the life of his times that any artist has ever made or is likely to make: as Thackeray said of the "Pictures of Life and Character," a social history of London in the middle of the nineteenth century," adding "lucky they (its future students) to have a book so pleasant!"

Today this inexhaustible work in three immense volumes is out of print, but there never was a book that better deserved continuous accessibility. The Oxford University Press, which has become the foster-father of the best works of reference, should take it over; it would be national service of the best kind, and national service is in need of illustrious examples. The three volumes are Leech's monument, and he has no other. One learns from it, while laughing the honestest of laughter, how sympathetic were the hands that held this mirror to his fellow-creatures' foibles, one learns, too, how inveterate a plagiarist from herself is Dame Fashion. The number of drawings which need only the slightest modernizing change to be telling today is extraordinary. Leech missed nothing; and the world is always boxing the compass.

The criticism has too often been made that Leech could not draw. Placed beside Keene or Phil May he is,

it is true, wanting in inevitableness; his line is merely efficient, never splendid; yet sometimes he could draw amazingly and get the very breath of life into a figure. In particular was he a master of gesture, and now and then his landscapes are a revelation. But the resplendent fact is that he could draw well enough; he did, as Thackeray said, what he wished to do: that is proved by his triumph. A man who cannot draw does not get all his fellow-countrymen following his pencil in a rapture (as though it were the Pied Piper's whistle) as Leech did for twenty years. Du Maurier, who admired him immensely, hit on a happy comparison when he said that Leech was ballad-writer among draughtsmen," or, in other words, he had the simplicity, the lucidity, the movement and the story. It has to be remembered, too, that Leech did single-handed whatever since his day it has needed a syndicate to accomplish. He, himself and alone, was cartoonist, social draughtsman, low-life draughtsman and the provider of hunting scenes. If the Volunteers were to be chaffed, Leech's was the hand; if the priceless Mr. Briggs was to be invented and kept busy, Leech was his impresario. And it was he also who drew the prettiest girls in what Thackeray called Mr. Punch's harem.

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All his life, after finding himself, Leech worked too hard, being in some mysterious way always in debt or about to be. Punch alone paid him over £40,000 in a little more than twenty years, and he received much besides; but necessity dogged him to the end, and he seems somewhat to have lacked method. At any rate, he was uniformly behind time; and Mark Lemon used humorously to bemoan a life half misspent in cabs between the Punch office and Leech's various residences collecting his be

lated work. Leech, however, when once he had made up his mind, drew very rapidly-always, of course, in those days before photography had come in, on the wood. An idea of his industry and vitality may be gathered from the books which he illustrated, each and all with the utmost care. Here are some of them: "The Ingoldsby Legends," "The Marchioness of Brinvilliers" (with etchings much in the manner of Cruikshank, who, as a matter of fact, gave him a few lessons in copperplate), Hood's "Comic Ani- · mals," Dickens's "Christmas Stories," 1843-48, Jerrold's "Story of a Feather," "The Comic History of England," "The Comic History of Rome," "Bon Gaultier," and (which some people would call his masterpiece), the sporting novels of Surtees, 1853-65.

In private life-but all his life was private-Leech was not less simple than that other great Carthusian, Colonel Newcome. He loved his family, rode his horse Red Mullet whenever there was a free moment, and as often as possible got a day's hunting with the Puckeridge hounds, not only for enjoyment, but in order that that very important section of his work, his hunting scenes, might not languish.

He was fond of dinner parties, both as host and guest, and after them preferred conversation to cards. He sang lugubrious songs in a deep, melancholy voice, with his eyes fixed upwards-the favorite being Barry Cornwall's "King Death," the words of which, Dickens averred, were inscribed on the ceiling in mystic characters discernible only by the singer. He told stories well, but the record of good things said by him is meagre, and his letters are singularly free from humorous passages. Once, however, when a liberty had been taken with him by a public man, he threatened "to draw and defend himself":

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and there is a pleasant story of his retort to some rowdy inebriated men in Kensington who excused themselves by saying that they were Foresters: "Then, why the devil don't you go to the forest and make a din there?" Noise was, indeed, his bane. He had double windows in his house, but was always in danger of headaches and shattered nerves from street sounds and, in particular, barrel organs. is even said that street music led to his early death; but probably that was so only indirectly. He died of overwork. Others of his antipathies were Jews, Irishmen, and Frenchmen; but these were more properly imperfect sympathies, cultivated humorously for business purposes. He was a foe, also, and partly no doubt for a similar reason, to excessive hair on the face; and once went so far as to cross hunting crops with two other artists, Tenniel and Pritchett, and join in an oath never to allow hair to grow either on lip or chin. Two of the three, however, defected. Pritchett returned from a sketching tour in Scotland all unshaven, while Tenniel's long mustache became famous, and in his old age he wore a beard as well. Leech to the end had only a fringe of whiskers of modest dimensions.

Although Leech nursed or affected to nurse certain intolerances, it is pretty certain that there were no reprisals. Unlike other satirists, he cannot have had an enemy, so kindly were his shafts. For a brief period Mulready nursed a grievance; but it was founded not upon the burlesque of his "envelope," but upon an imagined criticism in the signature-the usual leech wriggling in the bottle. This the painter, who was not reader of Punch and who seems to have been dangerously ready to fit on caps, conceived to be a subtle suggestion that his commercial methods were those of a blood sucker. But

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all was eventually put right at a dinner at Egg's. Leech's friends were devoted to him, as he to them. Thackeray came first, and indeed once he said that he loved him more than any man, although on another occasion it was FitzGerald and Brookfield whom he named as chief. Dickens and Leech were close friends as well as collaborators; and on one occasion when they were staying together by the sea Dickens had to act both as Leech's doctor and nurse, and performed the tasks with great success. It is to another friend, Dean Hole, with whom Leech took the "Little Tour in Ireland" in 1858, that we must go for the best description of Leech's appearance-"A slim, elegant figure, over six feet in height, with a grand head, on which nature had written Gentleman,' with wonderful genius in his ample forehead; wonderful penetration, observation, humor in his blue-gray Irish eyes, and wonderful sweetness and sympathy and mirth about his lips, which seemed to speak in silence." Millais, who coached Leech in oil painting for his exhibition of enlarged scenes from the career of Mr. Briggs, also was his close friend; and another remarkable man, whom Millais painted, and whose name seems a little strange here, Trelawny, who wrote "The Adventures of a Younger Son," claimed to have loved Leech next only to Shelley. "Very few of us painters," said Millais before a committee to inquire into the workings of the Royal Academy, "will leave behind us such good and valuable work as Leech has left-work which is in great part historical," the point being that, in the opinion of Millais, the Royal Academy's doors should be thrown open also to artists in black and white. Another painter friend was W. P. Frith, who became Leech's biographer; but the Life is rather a collection of notes for a book than a

finished work. No one has written of Leech better than Dr. John Brown in "Hore Subsecivæ," third series. All his friends testify to the sweetness of his nature and the purity of his character, while each of his two great novelist friends, writing of his workDickens of his "Rising Generation" and Thackeray of the "Pictures of Life and Character"-used independently the phrase that he came to his task like "a gentleman." In those days, gentlemen, at any rate, in public places, were less uncommon than now; but even then Leech was conspicuous.

It is perhaps with Dickens and Thackeray that Leech will be most closely associated by posterity. He stands between them as a fellow Victorian colossus. All three were doing, in different ways, the same work; that is to say, they were selecting and fixing, for all time, their time; and all three were distinguished for that remarkable abundance which makes the middle years of the last century so astonishing to us. Dickens, Thackeray, Carlyle, Macaulay, Ruskin, Trollope, Leech, in England; Dumas, Balzac, Hugo, Doré, in France. What rivulets today compared with those floods! Leech died prematurely (in his father's arms, while a children's party The Times.

was in progress in his house) on October 29, 1864, at the age of fortyseven, less than a year after Thackeray. "How happy," said Lady Ritchie (then Miss Thackeray), "my father will be to meet him!" The funeral was on November 4 at Kensal-green, and great crowds of people assembled. The artist lies not far from Tom Hood, with whom he had close affinities of temperament, and next but one to Thackeray. His death was lamented not only in the English but in the foreign Press. The Kladderadatsch of Berlin had a picture of Mr. Punch and Toby disconsolate at the grave, and a valedictory eulogy entitled "A Cypress Branch for the Tomb of John Leech'

"Farewell, merry John, thou boy of endless good humor." Punch's own tribute contained such phrases as "to know him well was to love him dearly... not another more refined or more generous nature. Society whose every phrase he has illustrated with a truth or grace and a tenderness heretofore unknown in satiric art, gladly and proudly takes charge of his fame." That was written in 1864. No words today, fifty-three years after, can improve on it; nor has in the interim any greater social delineator or humaner genius arisen.

THE CASE AGAINST PERSECUTION.

A country which is fighting for freedom abroad should be very careful to maintain freedom at home. The test of freedom is the treatment of those who differ from us. We can all be free easily enough as long as we are all of one mind. But how does a nation treat those who refuse to conform to its requirements? That is the test. There are two forms of such refusal. One is the refusal of the criminal who disobeys the law for his

own advantage. The philosophical Anarchists would not even coerce the criminal, but no society has yet existed which has seen a way of reconciling liberty in this relation with the needs of order. The other kind of refusal is the nonconformity of conscience, and the measure of freedom in society is to be found in the methods of dealing with those who disobey on this ground. The two things, of course, may be confused with one another.

Men may plead conscience insincerely, and what is called conscience may be only a name for some form of egoism, priggishness, cantankerousness. But where conscientious refusal is known to be sincere, how does society deal with it? That is the true test of freedom.

It cannot be said universally that society is bound to let the conscientious objector go his own way. The nation is not bound to allow plans which it deems essential to its well-being to be wrecked by the refusal of a few objectors, however admirable their motive may be. None the less, a nation impregnated with the spirit of freedom will do its utmost to find a way of accommodation. It will take pains to discriminate the genuine from the false objector. It will seek methods of conciliation, and in the last resort it will apply coercion, if it sees no way out of it, with the utmost leniency compatible with the circumstances of the case.

How does this country come out of the test in regard to the conscientious objectors to military service? Their case was a strong one for two reasons. In the first place, the adoption of military service in this country was a sudden breach with a long-standing, cherished tradition. Successive generations had grown up under a system of voluntary service. People had come to England from Continental lands to escape military service. Those who opposed conscription were therefore conservatives, holding to the oldestablished customs of the country, and could hardly be expected to change their views in a moment along with the majority. That brings us to the second reason for a liberal and compassionate view. There were religious bodies-one great congregation universally respected and of ancient date, others smaller but not less sincere -well known for their resolute op

position to war as war. Less known but equally real was the opposition based on secular grounds. The existence of such bodies was proof that there would be a certain number of individuals who could not accept military service without doing violence to a perfectly incere conviction.

Was there not any possibility of meeting this conviction without wrecking the whole scheme of compulsion? The late Government and Parliament thought that there was, and the two Military Service Acts accordingly contained conscience clauses. Unfortunately these clauses were ill-drawn, and no adequate provision was made for the administration of an exceedingly delicate and difficult point. In place of laying down tests of sincerity, such as the evidence of a certain number of independent and respectable witnesses, everything was left to the arbitrary decision of the tribunals. Provision was made, not without success, for those whose conscientious objection applies to the actual work of slaughter but who do not object to indirect participation in war. In general, though there have been some almost unintelligible exceptions, this particular form of conscientious objection has been met. But the out-and-out objector, to whom the whole business of war stands on one footing and who demands only one form of exemption -namely, absolute exemption,-has fared less well. According to the figures collected by Mrs. Hobhouse, absolute exemption has been granted to some 400 men and refused to others whose number is not exactly known but is between 800 and 1,000. refusing this exemption the tribunals have, as has been proved by the events, sinned against the Act which they were administering, because these

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*I Appeal Unto Caeser. By Mrs. Henry Hobhouse. With Introduction by Professor Gilbert Murray. London: George Allen and Unwin. Pp. 83-84. 1s. net.

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